Unitone HiFi & TriggerX: Past, Present, Future for Joost
Knowing that Paul Casserly's Strawpeople had originated at student station bFM, as did an early incarnation of the band of another Strawpeople friend, Greg Johnson, I was curious to know whether Joost had met them there too. "No, actually I went to school with Greg and we played in a school band together with Paul. With bFM, that all sort of flowed on from there. I've sort of played with Greg for quite some time and went overseas for a while and came back in 1988 and I played with him for about a year and a half as The Greg Johnson Set."
In the incestuous New Zealand music industry, there always seems to be ways of linking one musician with another, and Joost has worked with yet another person connected to the Strawpeople and Greg Johnson — Victoria Kelly. Joost and former Strawpeople singer Victoria, who also did the orchestral arrangements for their album Vicarious and Greg Johnson's Chinese Whispers, have written the soundtrack for radio drama, Claybourne. "We're also working on a vocal track to go with Claybourne, a single to launch the programme, which Victoria will sing."
It's obvious Joost is very active in the New Zealand music scene right now. Yet he has not always lived here. Having arrived in New Zealand in 1979 at a young age from Holland (he was known as Dutchieman in Unitone HiFi), he also lived in New York for a long time and finds their music scene very different to ours. "I think one of the main differences is that people there are a lot more specialised in what they do — 'cos over here people can quite easily go between doing electronic music to a rockier kind of thing and it can toe in quite easily. I think also the music scene is a bit more serious there in the sense that there's more money involved. Its seen as a business as well, which is quite healthy in some aspects — but also takes away some of the purity out of why you're looking at music. But the money element's quite good because you also need to live and get some financial rewards for your efforts!"
Joost seems to be a bit of a traveller, so when Unitone HiFi became popular in Germany and France, of course they visited. "We were quite popular in an underground kind of sense. We did a
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